If we would only embrace Genocide, all would be well!

How else are we going to get rid of all potential enemies?

Scary Brown People and a Nancy Pelosi Congress!

No one's gonna turn MY family into gay Muslim terrorist welfare queens!

Yes, if only Hollywood made more violent, pro-war movies, then... oh wait.

Nevermind.

Kevin: I am somewhat disappointed that you have not yet addressed the more significant question of the desirability of an American empire.

I think it's a reprehensible idea, irrespective of whether or not we are technologically or gastroenterologically capable of acquiring and maintaining one.

Kevin, how about the fact that the goal of the British empire was to be, well, an empire, while the goal of adventures like Vietnam, and now Iraq is . . . . .

well, what the heck is the goal, exactly?

Radio and the railroads existed at the time of WWII, and Nazi Germany succedded in occypying countries which, but for a massiver invasion by the U.S., might still be in their control.

Gay Muslim terrorist *illegal alien* welfare queens!

Sigh...how about saying 'All of the Above' and moving on?

well, what the heck is the goal, exactly?

To spread love and peace and shopping malls, of course.

Silly boy.

I don't think there's much utility is isolating one or two reasons that Ferguson's yen for modern empire will never be satisfied. Things have changed, a lot, since the days of the British Empire. All those changed things combined make it pretty stupid to wish for the resolve to make it happen again.

So in a Republican brain, the picture of a Nancy Pelosi is much more scary than that of Dennis Hastert? Perhaps I am missing something here. Help me. Please.

Actually, the British were much more brutal than we are prepared to be, and the Brits STILL had trouble with the Iraqis and had to high tail it out of there eventually. I aways thought from the start that if the Brits, who were far better at colonialization than we were, couldnt deal with these people, we would have no chance.

Ironic indeed. Everytime, anyone bumbles the idiocy about more satellite dishes and cell phone towers in Bagdhad, I want to shout my head off.

Radio, cell phones, satellite tv are not only instruments of organization. They also hammer and shape political consciousness, a concept missing from the agrarian societies early colonialists ruled over.

Yes to gregor's comment. Yes, Yes, Yes.

Until someone faces up to the reality that at the moment our foreign policy has virtually all of the downsides of "empire" from the expense to the death to the ill will, and virtually none of the benefits, there is not going to be a significant change for the better.

Certainly, posters are going to weigh in with some arguments that this is about oil control, but I urge those not already too set in their opinions to think about that one for a moment, and ask yourselves if any of our recent foreign policiy decisions have in any way been necessary to secure oil.

Secure it from who? Has the Klingon or Romulan empire invaded recently and threatened to take all of the oil

Kevin lobs in post afeter post as to how the oil producing countries are selling it as fast as they can get it out of the ground. Then he posts that we are at peak oil and they simply can't get it out of the ground fast enough.

I think he's right. I also think that in a world where literally millions of people are dedicated to getting the black stuff out of the ground as fast as possible and selling it to the highest bidder, using military force to (to what, exactly) is the height of stupidity.

As an Adobe Dweller here in the Sonoran Desert, I can't accept the notion that Al-Jazeera has changed the landscape just yet. However, if one were to compare and contrast the Internet to Al-Jazeera, the Internet would be seen as having the greater impact. And if a vote were possible, I would side with the Internet. And being the 'contrarian' that I am, I would vote twice,if it were possible.

All kidding aside, we Democrats tend to overlook what Reagan did back in the 1980's, and have yet to emulate such behavior. He went out and allocated considerable taxpayer dollars and simultaneously encouraged financial trusts and foundations to spend their monies wisely, by inviting foreign students to attend and matriculate successfully our educational institutions. Thusly, it is now these foreign students that have 'institutionalized' the Moderate and Progressive communities throughout the world, in that the self-governance for a Democracy is the preferred way to go.

Just a Thought From Indian Country.

More recently, CNN and al-Jazeera have permanently changed the landscape of insurgent war, and it's a change we haven't yet come to grips with. Considering the fact that the United States is the acknowledged master of entertainment and mass communication, this is sort of ironic, but there you have it.

No, it works quite well. Our enemy's media craps all over the U.S., its president, and the war, while the U.S. media...also craps all over the U.S., its president, and the war.

Kevin, ahead of the radio, I'd put the amazing amounts of free and/or below market price armaments with which the US and the old Soviet Union flooded the formerly colonial part of the world during the Cold War. These lands are now more than capable of doing serious damange to any occupier, as we've seen in Iraq.
A pisspot land like Sudan has the wherewithal to make milirary intervention in Darfur a non-starter.

The goal is a form of economic colonialism. The insight in the postwar era was that it's not necessary to formally rule, it is merely necessary to extract the resources and the money and obtain cheap labor. It's better for business if the locals live under the illusion that they have self-rule, or if not, the local government is responsible for all the problems. Bribing the local elites to create a "healthy business climate" is much cheaper than spending the blood of the rich countries' young.

The latest weapon is one-sided "free trade" agreements that function like one-way filters: protectionism for rich countries' agriculture and "intellectual property" and free trade when it benefits the well-off. When Mexican agriculture collapses because small Mexican farmers can't compete with subsidized American agribusiness, even better: millions of rural Mexicans cross the border to work cheap.

Hank:

Kevin, how about the fact that the goal of the British empire was to be, well, an empire, while the goal of adventures like Vietnam, and now Iraq is . . . . .well, what the heck is the goal, exactly?

Radio and the railroads existed at the time of WWII, and Nazi Germany succedded in occypying countries which, but for a massiver invasion by the U.S., might still be in their control.

Your own post suggests an answer to your question. Why did the U.S. invade Germany? Why did Germany invade Poland and other nations?

The British were trying to take over territory. Cynics aside, the U.S. has, in its recent wars, been trying to free territory from tyranny. There is a difference, both in methods, difficulty, and outcomes.

A conquering empire can effectively brutalize nations. If you are trying to free a country, this isn't right or even feasible, and the ways of warfare have to be different.

This restraint costs fewer civilian lives in the battlefield nation, but more lives of the troops doing the fighting.

Another reason why we can't get our empire on:

We're governed by idiots.

Wouldn't the proliferation of advanced weapons also contribute? Any person in any country on the planet could find an assault rifle if he put his mind to it , not to mention large quantities of material suitable for home-made bombs. Humanity can just kill itself easier these days. Hell, teenagers can waste American high schools with nothing more than their father's gun collection and some bad weed.

Radio and the railroads existed at the time of WWII, and Nazi Germany succedded in occypying countries which, but for a massiver invasion by the U.S., might still be in their control.

There's a typo in the above. Instead of "massive invasion by the U.S." you must have meant to write "massive invasion by the U.S.S.R." It was the Soviets, not the Americans, who did the most to overthrow Hitler.

the U.S. has, in its recent wars, been trying to free territory from tyranny

Good Lord.

Where to start.

The world is full of tinpot dictatorships as ugly & brutal Iraq's.
This includes some Allies in the War on Terra.

Not to forget
WMDs, reconstituted Nu-Kewlar prgram etc

'Immagined Communities' by B Anderson is the classic on the growth of national conciousness in places like the Philipines, Indo-Chine, Indonesia and South America.

The radio was important. But more so was the novel and the development of the colonial bureacracy.

gregor on October 25, 2006 at 12:40 PM:

I am somewhat disappointed that you have not yet addressed the more significant question of the desirability of an American empire.

Exactly! Y'all are arguing about what are the components of successful empire-building - Reason #238: Lack of body-snatching pod-people - and seeming to buy into the larger neocon idea of an American Empire being a good thing...

What do these little brown people in Mesopotamia know about civilization anyway? They only invented writing, the wheel, organized government and religion, professional armies, walled cities, agriculture and irrigation canals, bridges, shipping (both on rivers and down the Persian Gulf), libraries, diplomacy, the earliest surviving literature and music, board games, etc.?

Really, I don't know how they've survived without us telling them what to do.

I don't know much about Indian history, but I think attributing changes in the 20's to radio is chronologically off. I'm pretty sure radios were nowhere near common enough at that time to have this kind of effect, and the broadcasts available would have been pretty straight BBC.

Which leaves the interesting question of what did change in the 20's? One of my years ago professors who was an Oxford student in the 20's once told me that the attitude of the English elite was what had changed, referencing the decline in desire to pursue careers in the imperial administration and (simultaneously) reluctance to crush the 1926 General Strike.

If I'm right about the chronology above, and I'm pretty sure I am, it illustrates what bothers me about the Tyler Cowans of this world, their permanent itch to substitute theory and cleverness for reality.

Not to deny the importance of radio -- it has been well pointed out that attempts to minimize American assistance to the USSR by citing the low proportion of tanks that were US provided founder on the significance of the use of US provided radios to coordinate small unit combat. But if the USSR needed gift radios to function in WW II, I doubt that India's rural populations were well provided with them in 1925.

Isn't it curious that the party that believes in states rights as opposed to a centralized federal government for reasons of efficiency and proximity can at the same time beleve that that same federal government it so detests has the right and capability to enforce its will on the world?

grape_crush: Y'all are arguing about what are the components of successful empire-building - Reason #238: Lack of body-snatching pod-people - and seeming to buy into the larger neocon idea of an American Empire being a good thing...

No, not necessarily. If something can't be done, trying to do it is bad, regardless of whether one's fantasy of doing it is good or bad.

Before Iraq the neocons were positively giddy with dreams of empire. I recall one worthy saying something like "what's the point of being a hegemon (is that really a noun) if you can't create an empire." I always thought such notions reflected a naive understanding of the world as it exists. More like looking at the modern world through the eyes of Rutyard Kipling or Winston Churchill than anything else. I kept hoping grownups would take charge, but they didn't.

Folks, our military has made total war (either conventional or nuclear) unthinkable. But it is not so good in the face of unconventional war. I have not yet encountered a conventional army that is any damn good at unconventional war.

For those who point to Nazi Germany as being a model of how to conquer and hold territory, I would suggest they didn't hold any place all that long. Even the Soviets (who were pretty successful at holding their empire for 40 or so years) couldn't hold an empire of countries not far from their border forever. They used political means as much as military to hold the empire in line.

American culture and American technology are probably too of the biggest reasons traditional empires are a thing of the past. Too damn bad our foreign policy "experts" can't seem to learn that simple truth. It is really sad tired old men like Rumsfeld and Cheney have such sway in foreign policy circles. The Chinese, Japanese, and a bunch of Asian countries have learned the lessons they and their students don't seem to capable of understanding.

Marshall McLuhan said radio is a hot medium, used for exciting the masses to action. Hitler and FDR both used the radio with extraordinary results. I believe the radio was used in Rwanda to exhort Hutus to kill Tutsis, and that it worked quite well.

Marshall McLuhan said TV is a cool medium, used for soothing the masses. I have suggested elswhere that TV be used to calm down warring peoples.

Satellite communication and the internets replace the human neurological system and allows for intantaneous information feedback of events all over the world, outering our ability to sense the world from our physical bodies. Combining satcom with TV informs people about events that have no impact on their daily lives, but invloves them nevertheless in the injustices and suffering of peoples or other living things they have no physical contact with, in real time. The internets allow that information to be discussed and added to in what has been called internet time.

The technology used to improve military power also improves the empowerment of people. Military power alone can no longer be used to subjugate populations due to the decentralizing power of modern mass communications. Popular opinion can no longer be usurped by simple weapons when the ability to inform and communicate is instantaneous. The only way to defeat such well informed popular willfulness is to create totalitarian societies, which is what I believe the US has tried to do in Iraq by emulating the Palestinian terror society model the Israelis have developed.

Mr. O'Grady:

As regards changes in the 1920's: the British lost over 900,000 men in World War I, 700,000 of them from the British Isles themselves. This from a total population of only 44 million (United Kingdom).

These were the men who would have been the soldiers, officers, administrators... in many cases, they were replaced by native-born, who began to wonder what loyalties they had to a distant island.

The key difference as I see it is this:

Empire building and imperialism were univerally accepted forms of government in centuries past. All major European nations built empires as did the United States (manifest destiny anyone?). Yes you had plenty of local rebellions and uprisings, including our own 1776 rebellion. But the major powers that ran the world did not question the inherent right of more advanced nations to claim territory and manage empires.

Today notions of empire in the traditional sense are almost completely discredited. And in those few areas of the world where forms of imperial occupation exist (Tibet, West Bank, Chechnya, Kurdistan, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Sudan, etc.) the process of occupation is endlessly bloody and generates widespread international opposition.

The British could conquer the world because for the most part, the peoples they conquered accepted their fate. That was how the world worked. Since the end of WW-II, colonialism and imperialism have been so discredited that few people anywhere on the planet will willingly accept it.

Comparing the US and the British Empire is as pointless as what our trolls keep doing: comparing Iraq to WWII. The points of comparison in both cases are negligible, and uninstructive.

A conquering empire can effectively brutalize nations. If you are trying to free a country, this isn't right or even feasible, and the ways of warfare have to be different.

The Lancet study midpoint is around 650000 excess deaths in 3 years. In comparison, Saddam -- in the dock as a mass murderer -- has been accused of 200,000 deaths in 24 years (1979-2003). I think a death rate greater than that of an accused mass murderer qualifies as brutal. Were we to stay at this dizzying pace through a period of time equal to Saddam's reign, we'd kill over 5 million people. That would put us in that special slot in the pantheon behind Mao, Stalin, and Hitler. And we'd have done it all in a pipsqueak place like Iraq. What couldn't we do if we spread out and applied ourselves to a world wide canvas?

No, not necessarily. If something can't be done, trying to do it is bad, regardless of whether one's fantasy of doing it is good or bad.

That sounds completely backward.

If something you want to do it is a priori bad, why would you want to worry about whether it can be done or not? At best it's a waste of your time.

"Yesterday I suggested that one of the reasons we're less able to subdue and occupy countries than Britain was in the days of empire is because we're less brutal than the British."

Subdue and occupy?

Huh?

Oh hang on.
I get it...

This is a blog and your just idly descanting with a pretended dementia for the sake of debunking the other fellow's delusions of grandeur.

Right?

Ha.
I get it now...

In his book "Imagined Communities," Anderson makes the point that one of the key factors in the development of nationalism is the role of media (e.g., newspapers, novels) in establishing widespread perception of a single, unitary time in which all activities of society take place. In view of this, the whole idea of a "cybercaliphate" seems remarkably plausible.

If something you want to do it is a priori bad, why would you want to worry about whether it can be done or not?

Let's say that Person A thinks the Empire Project is totally awesome, because everybody (well, every American elite, anyway) will get a pony. Person B (that's you and me) thinks the Empire Project is immoral.

The odds that we can reach Person A on the a priori morality issue are not good. Person A is amoral.

However, the odds that we can reach Person A on the "Holy Shit, that's a stupid idea! It just can't be done!" issue, though slim, are not nonexistent. Thus, this is the issue to work on.

Yes.

Through chatrooms and websites people can imagine themselves as part of a wider, transnational community. Whether devoted to comic books or jihad. Ironically this breaks down the national constructs earlier media and bureacracies had helped erect.

dj moonbat

I might agree with you if we are trying to persuade the person A.

But as soon as you start talking about the achievability or lack thereof of a goal, you are implicitly conceding something to the proponent of the idea, and it becomes a technical issue rather than a value issue.

Liberals's tendency to do that has led to the present morass that our country faces.

Ironically this breaks down the national constructs earlier media and bureacracies had helped erect.

Well, I'm not sure that's true. Creating bonds of common cultural identity can reinforce nationality, since that's all nationality really is; OTOH, because geography is less important, it is less likely to reinforce nation-states, as such thrive on the correspondence between perceived common national identity and a defined territory. Though, still, identities that already have a geographic component aren't disfavored, it is just that the nature of the medium doesn't restrict communities geographically, so they still can strengthen existing, very traditional, geographically-tied, national identities.

Liberals's tendency to do that has led to the present morass that our country faces.

No. Person A has led to the morass. Liberals have not done enough to stand in the way. If you think that making the moral, rather than the pragmatic case, against empire would have stopped the war--rather than simply destroying the Democratic representation in Congress--that's your business. What's upsetting to me is that they didn't bother to make either one.

dj moonbat on October 25, 2006 at 1:24 PM:

If something can't be done, trying to do it is bad..

Kev, Cowen, and Ferguson don't state that it can't be done, just that it can't be done in the same manner other countries have done it in the past due to technological advancements, changing social mores, et cetera. Empire-building can still be done, but the concept of empire-building (invading a foreign country with the intent of controlling resources - the definition I'm using) is morally flawed to begin with.

..regardless of whether one's fantasy of doing it is good or bad.

A pig can fly, with sufficient thrust...but it's still a pig, and you don't want to be underneath it when it passes overhead...In this case, the concept of invading a country and subjugating the native population in order to control that country's resources is the pig...as wrongheaded now as it was in the past.

dj moonbat on October 25, 2006 at 1:59 PM:

Person A is amoral. However, the odds that we can reach Person A on the...issue, though slim, are not nonexistent.

Person A, being an amoral bastard, reads Ferguson's column and says, "Yeah! If we just went at them harder and with more committment, then I'd have my pony! Nuke 'em!"

Thus, this is the issue to work on.

No, the issue to work on is keeping our amoral Person A well away from making decisions of this nature.

No, the issue to work on is keeping our amoral Person A well away from making decisions of this nature.

Person A is well-represented in the voting populace.

gregor on October 25, 2006 at 2:04 PM:

..as soon as you start talking about the achievability or lack thereof of a goal, you are implicitly conceding something to the proponent of the idea, and it becomes a technical issue rather than a value issue.

Exactly...Again.

dj moonbat on October 25, 2006 at 2:09 PM:

If you think that making the moral, rather than the pragmatic case, against empire would have stopped the war...What's upsetting to me is that they (Dems) didn't bother to make either one.

Apples and oranges. The Iraq war the American people were sold was a defensive one - we do this or your hometown goes up in a mushroom cloud - and was not sold as an expansion of the American Empire. Given the bullshit Dubya was pushing at the time, any mention of or argument against empire-building at that time would at best been viewed as hysteria.

dj moonbat on October 25, 2006 at 2:19 PM:

Person A is well-represented in the voting populace.

Not as much as you think. But they are well-funded, having more ponies than most of the population...All the more reason for keeping them away from the levers of power through tools such as campaign finance reform, better enforcement of disclosure rules, et cetera.

Not to pile on someone who essentially agrees with me, but
one word answer to dj moonbat:

Michael Dukakis. OK two words.

S Ra,

I'm well aware of your point, and don't think it contradicts mine. In fact, the apparently completely accurate figure of 20,000 British dead on the first day of the Battle of the Somme is much harder for me to believe than the numbers in the much attacked Lancet study.

Still, the gentleman in question (born in 1906 into completely English pretty upper class circumstances) illustrates a different point, made famously by rather more famous literary and cultural types -- the elite generation coming of age in the 20's had very different values than their parents and grandparents -- maybe Virginia Woolf is to blame?

And massive casualties in wars can have different effects -- compare (as Bernard deVoto famously did) the future endeavors of the generation that survived the American Civil War (empire builders par excellence) with the Americans who came out of the WW I -- or compare Hemingway's masculinity with Granville Dodge's. (Lest that point be too obscure Dodge, after whom the City but not the car is named, was a Union officer who was a major railroad engineer.)

Prior to the 20th century also, much of the world outside of Europe and North America was pre-national. Anderson and others point to the colonial period as something that paradoxically created conditions for nationalism in the colonies, such as the languages Europeans developed for their colonies like in Vietnam and Indonesia. The uprisings in Iraq and India are events that also led to the creation of a national consciousness.

S Ra, other than the loss of the administrators in WWI, it was also an event that called into question the purpose of Empire and devoting oneself to God, King, Country and so forth.

Joe Buck, if only it were that simple, all that could have been accomplished much more easily by opening up toward Iraq, or even still Iran, Syria and so forth. The countries that have been closed off from the US would gladly open themselves up to trade from US. It's our "allies" like SA that have highly nationalized economies operate outside the international economic system other than with oil (and have no real willingness to do otherwise)

Like everywhere else, it was sea power that allowed Britain to dominate India.

Britain could sit offshore and lob cannonballs at Indian coastal cities until they capitulated. Even though India had (as I once read) collectively a standing army of 2 million at the time, there was not a thing they could do against Britain's tactical use of sea tech.

Well, that and Britain exploited the tensions between Hindu and Muslim Indians. Divide and conquer, baybee.

Disputo brings up a valid point: The importance of naval power.

Iran has a modern navy, and it is headquartered in a facility that the US helped them build in the waning days of the Shah. (Bandar-e' Abbas Google it.)

The very last flight we took out of Shiraz, after the facility was completed, my dad looked down at the gleeming new buildings and ships in port as our plane went over and said "Jesus Christ. I hope we didn't just make a huge fucking mistake there."

...this is sort of ironic, but there you have it.

Ironies abound. This nation owes its very existence to a ragtag insurgency that was able to stymie a superpower. That insurgency rose up in response to that superpower's suppression of habeas corpus.

And so on...

Iran has a modern navy

Which may be true in the sense that the phrase "modern navy" is used to distinguish among navies that aren't the US Navy, but the US Navy is sui generis.

If naval dominance alone was enough for effective capacity to establish empire, the US today would have far more capacity in that respect that any past power (including the British of the 18th through early 20th centuries.)

In terms of naval power, there is no possible combination of adversaries that poses a serious threat to US dominance.

Unfortunately for US practical power, naval power alone may do a lot, but it isn't enough to win the kind of wars the US tends to fight.

" Radio, which spread in the 1920s, told people what was going on and cemented national consciousness. Those technologies heralded the later end of colonialism, with WWII hurrying along the new equilibrium."

It's nothing to do with technology, IMHO: it's to do with national identity and cohesion. The British faced periodic upheavals in Ireland since at least Wolfe Tone's 1798 rebellion (you can also count earlier uprisings if you like, but I'd argue they did not have as strong a national-identity component).

India was not in any sense a united polity before the East India Company (and later the British government) began to increasingly assert control over the subcontinent. It took the British, and later Gandhi and the Congress Party, to create a somewhat cohesive national identity, and even that was only partially successful (cf. partition).

Not to mention a huge worldwide market for guns and ammo and chemicals. I'm sure the British would have found their conquests much more challenging had every Indian an accurate rifle and easy access to explosives.

You're all barking up the wrong tree. The Romans knew very well that, once you fought the war with the Legions, you needed to install a local governor or equivalent, who had absolute power over the populace, with harsh draconian measures for any infringements. That governor would live there; it was a position of honor; they might speak the local language and learn the local customs; and then the Romans would proceed to put in the aqueducts and the roads that have survived till today. The U.S. balks at such involvement, balks at such extension of its empire, and therefore can never control another country with which it has fought a war. The English did some of this; at least they had colonial administrators; and for a while that worked. So the U.S. goes in, wins the military war, and then loses everything else. One attempt at this, a halfway measure, is to install a local dictator, such as the Shah or even Pinochet, and hope they will not be toppled. But, by and large, the U.S. has not seen fit to do what it really takes to control the losing entities. None of what I'm talking about is "nice"; but neither is what we've done to Iraq and Afghanistan or what we did to Iran under the Shah.

Radio, which spread in the 1920s, told people what was going on and cemented national consciousness.

Well yes, it's radio and all other means of improved communication. But I don't think it's because radio enhances national consciousness so much as that acts of wantom killing become known to so many people so fast. The moral high ground is lost.

A century ago, it would not have so obvious, so fast, that the stated reason for the U.S. invasion of Iraq was bogus. Today, it's harder to hide the truth, be it lack of WMD or the killing of huge numbers of people.

That's what I think the biggest difference is. Harder to hide information and harder to sell bogus justifications.

Good lord, the 'flypaper' theory does work- Kevin's post has attracted some really whacko answers.

First prize to 'Disputo' for his sea-power theory. I wonder if Disputo has ever looked at a map and noticed that India is a subcontinent? Disputo gets bonus points for not realizing that India had no substantial maritime trade for the English to dominate.

Special runner-up awards for the idea that radio is the catalyst of nationalism (tell it to Blucher) and the idea that Irish identity didn't become a headache for the English until c.1798.

And, of course, the perennial favorite, "We're too kind for their own good". Two million dead Vietnamese might argue that one.

I think we'd all benefit by reading a good book this evening.

"Radio,......told people what was going on and raised national consciousness"

In order to become all warm and fuzzy over that, I must tune out the blare from radios at a nearby construction site - From seven until dusk, there is that litany of raising national consciousness, "Rush Limbaugh, Hugh Hewitt, Laura Ingraham, Dennis Prager, Michael Savage, Michael Medved, Lars Larson (local whacko), Sean Hannity and good old Mr Falafel himself, Bill-O".

First prize to 'Disputo' for his sea-power theory. I wonder if Disputo has ever looked at a map and noticed that India is a subcontinent? Disputo gets bonus points for not realizing that India had no substantial maritime trade for the English to dominate.

SC wins the prize for missing the point.

The point is not that Brit sea power was able to dominate Indian sea power -- as you indicate, India was not a sea power. The point is that Brit sea power was able to dominate Indian land power.

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I have no recipe for empire building, but apropos the importance of radio in cementing national consciousness, it is also no accident that the success of the civil rights movement in the US tracked the spread of television through the country. Images of Bull Connor appearing in Northern and Western living rooms both exposed and isolated the South, in Congress as well as in the American imagination ... just as images of Abu Ghraib have isolated America in the world. What we see of ourselves when we try to dominate so contradicts our internal image of ourselves that our will to power wilts, thank God. Too bad so many "others" have to be killed and mutilated before we take notice of what we too often are.

In order to become all warm and fuzzy over that, I must tune out the blare from radios at a nearby construction site - From seven until dusk, there is that litany of raising national consciousness, "Rush Limbaugh, Hugh Hewitt, Laura Ingraham, Dennis Prager, Michael Savage, Michael Medved, Lars Larson (local whacko), Sean Hannity and good old Mr Falafel himself, Bill-O".

Yeah, while radio has a role, a more balanced description of it might be as a facilitator of group identity. Sometimes that can be through shining a light on the facts, sometimes it can be as a propaganda medium. Often, its a mixture of both.

Thanks, cmdicely, for keeping it in perspective.

What a symplistic post by Kevin D. Some times you really worry me.

I haven't taken time to read much of the thread and probably will not.

So how, without radio, etc, do you reason every rebellion throughout history, some country wide. Communication works both ways; dominator and subjugated.

What a rediculous post. Sort of like the Repugnut logic. And some of the more brutal regimes and empires lasted less time than the British. A few more. Historical context also not included!

Is this a justification for US brutality? What's the point?

'...Cynics aside, the U.S. has, in its recent wars, been trying to free territory from tyranny. There is a difference, both in methods, difficulty, and outcomes....

Posted by: harry on October 25, 2006 at 12:55 PM | PERMALINK

But still trying to control the world for their own benefit, affecting people from income, to work, to national politics, industry, polution and environment. Nice, simple, ever-beneficent US.

Aaaaah! What a dink.

SC - Sea power dominates countries that do not have comparable naval capabilities. That was Disputo's point.

No need to risk your own personnel if you can just sit off shore and lob artillery at the cities of the population you want to subdue. Soften 'em up this way, then foster divisions between disparate groups that will readily turn on one another after the constant bombardment has had the desired effect.

I think we'd all benefit by reading a good book this evening.serial catowner at 7:11 PM

The books' premise was that in the contests between France and England in the 18th century, domination of the sea via naval power was the deciding factor in the outcome, and therefore, that control of seaborne commerce was critical to domination in war. To a modern reader this may seem obvious and repeatedly demonstrated, but the notion was much more radical in Mahan's time, especially in a nation entirely obsessed with landward expansion to the west.

The indians did not need sea power, they just needed cannons to fire back with. There is a reason people built forts full of cannons at the entrance to harbors - land based cannon can be bigger and more accurate with longer range, and can shred fleets of ships. If the Indians had cannons with range equivalent of that to the british, the british ships could not have bombarded their cities with impunity.